Jenny's Winter Vacation in Germany

As most of you know, I visited Germany this January. Well, it was very cold and snowy, but absolutely wonderful and so I would like to share a little bit of the adventure with Jackson Leaks. Most of the time was spent in Berlin with family, of course, but I also rode the train through the former communist East Germany all the way to the north of Germany to visit the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea, where my sister fortunately has a vacation house. This turned out to be the highlight of my vacation and is thus the topic for this post. The Baltic Sea is almost an inland sea, bordered by Sweden and Finland, etc., and thus much quieter than the Atlantic. The water at the edge of the shore therefore lapped gently over the firestones found there. The firestones arose from the chalks at the cliffs of Rügen, which were produced from the glaciers of the ice age covering the area for thousands of years. During our hike the sea was partially frozen and wild swans were swimming in the shallows along with some little black ducks. Behind the sandy beach tall reeds were growing, from which the locals make wonderful roofs for their houses. They are flammable, however, and during New Years Eve some fireworks went astray and one house actually burned up! Beyond the reeds there are steep cliffs in places and my sister Jutta and I hiked up a very tall cliff, from where the view was truly astonishing. The weather was grey and misty and on the beach there suddenly appeared two moving shadows in the distance. As they came closer they revealed themselves distinctly as a man with a horse. To our delight he was very sociable and told us all about his horse and his life on the island, many years of which were spent under communist rule. The horse's name is Janek and he is half Haflinger and half Norwegian. He was a very beautiful and gentle horse and the man, whose name is Siegfried Grutzmacher, helped each of us in turn onto it's bare back. Siegfried and I shared a cigarette and I almost fell in love. But then he and Janek slowly disappeared into the mist as mysteriously as they had appeared. It seemed like a dream, but I have pictures to prove it. All in all the sheer natural winter beauty of this island is a scene I will never forget. Although we did not actually visit the part with the chalk cliffs, you can catch a glimpse of this part by googling David Caspar Friedrich's "The Chalk Cliffs" of Rügen, a famous romantic painting. Other than that you'll have to make do with the few pictures attached below. Even so, you'll want to consider this island as your next vacation spot. If so, just let me know, as my sister's neighbor rents out some awesome apartments in a reed roof house near the beach!